Refugee manipulation an ethical dilemma
for humanitarian aid

The refugees had lived in a lush valley where
they grew fruits and vegetables until the civil
war came. Routed by rebels of another ethnic
group, some of the refugees now carry out
terrorist attacks across the cease-fire line.
They try to keep their fellows from returning
home, believing it will be easier to mount an
attack of the new government if the refugees
don't return home. Both sides in the battle,
however, allow them to return home for harvest
season.

This story of migrant Georgians, initially
displaced by a civil war with Abkhans in 1992-93,
was one of many examples of refugee manipulation
summarized at a symposium on the ethics of
humanitarian aid to refugees at the Bechtel
Conference Center on Nov. 4.

Not a session for the faint of heart, the
symposium aired the dirty linen of humanitarian
work with refugees. Sponsored by Stanford's
Program in Ethics in Society and the Center for
International Security and Cooperation (CISAC),
the discussion was an attempt to begin grappling
with the ethical dilemmas of current
international law and practices related to
refugees.

Tens of thousands of displaced Georgians are
"manipulated into a kind of permanent forced
relocation," said Catherine Dale, a graduate
student at the University of California-Berkley
who is part of a U.N. observer team in the former
Soviet Union country of Georgia. The warring
sides ­ Abkhaz police who control the Georgian
province of Abkhazia and the displaced Georgian
militias ­ let the refugees go home temporarily,
she said, because both sides depend on their
harvest labor for survival. "It's a
brilliant exercise in labor exploitation,"
she told the Stanford audience.

The government of Georgia and the United
Nations High Commission for Refugees contribute
to keeping the refugees in a state of limbo, she
said, by carrying out special registration and
aid qualification programs, which have the effect
of distinguishing them from the local population.

Manipulation of refugee populations is not new
but "international actors haven't yet faced
up to the ethical and policy implications of
it," said Stephen Stedman, a senior research
scholar of civil warfare at Stanford's CISAC.
Humanitarian aid often permits warring groups to
wage war longer, he said, so that saving lives
today can cost more lives down the road.

The United States, for example, was among
those who contributed humanitarian aid to refugee
camps along the Thai-Cambodian border in the
1970s and '80s. "That aid took the Khmer
Rouge from the brink of oblivion and made them a
legitimate actor in the Cambodian civil
war," Stedman said. The United States also
armed Afghan refugees who fought against the
Soviet Union, and just this year considered
arming Albanian rebels who were recruiting young
males in U.N.-sponsored refugee camps.

"People don't always understand that the
neutrality of humanitarian aid stands opposed to
solidarity" with a refugee group, he said.
"When it's refugees we like, we think it's
OK to further their cause." When we
disagree, he said, "we think aid should be
only humanitarian and [politically]
neutral."

One of the problems is that international law
related to refugees was written for the Cold War
era, said Margaret McGuinness, a recent graduate
of Stanford Law School who is a former foreign
service officer. States were expected to take in
people who were persecuted by the governments of
other states. Now, most refugees are running from
civil conflicts within states, she said.

Leaders of rebellions need refugees to
legitimize their campaigns, Stedman said, and
often hold them hostage, forcing them to pay
taxes or "volunteer" for fighting. The
militias who caused the recent destruction of
East Timor, for example, now control the refugee
camps in West Timor, he said. "They have an
enormous potential to regroup there and be a
constant threat to East Timor. If you care about
East Timor, you have to convince your national
government to take some action, because in the
end, it still comes down to individual countries
making the decision about whether to support an
action."

Refugees often jeopardize economic and
political stability in host countries, and they
have been the "catalyst" for a war that
is virtually continent-wide in Africa, said
Howard Adelman, founder of the Centre for Refugee
Studies at York University in Canada. The 1994
refugee camps for Rwandans in Zaire led to the
toppling of Zaire's government, he said, and have
led to all sorts of military aid alliances since.
Many of those camps were controlled by the former
Rwandan military and militia members who had
committed the genocide in Rwanda earlier and who
wanted to keep the refugees out of Rwanda in
order to launch a renewed attack, he said.

But Adelman cautioned against seeing refugees
only as victims of manipulation and violence,
because they also can take independent action.
"My own interpretation of what happened in
Zaire [when 673,000 refugees suddenly returned to
Rwanda] is that the refugees finally got fed up
with their own leaders and left." He
suggested host countries are better off giving
refugees citizenship rights than allowing them to
remain in statelessness and hopelessness, as
Lebanon did with the Palestinians and Pakistan is
doing now with Afghans.

Other manipulators include foreign countries
and corporations, international aid agencies and
international media, Adelman said. In Zaire,
French and American companies gave assistance to
some groups in hopes of earning more profits from
the country's minerals.

"One of the greatest manipulators of
refugees are the media because suffering
sells," Adelman said. Media reports
sometimes exaggerate the suffering and, in
particular, the numbers involved, he added.

Reporters did write about the Kosovo
Liberation Army using Albanian refugee camps to
recruit young males into service earlier this
year, Stedman said. "But I never saw one
editorial raising questions about [the ethics of]
it."

There are few alternatives, Stedman said. One
would be to "walk away from situations"
where humanitarian efforts aid warring groups.
Another would be to "establish standard
conduct rules for rebels" before going in.
The problem with the latter, he said, is that
"there is no single negotiation point now,
when so many aid groups rush in."